Poynter on the Record

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Pundits and political junkies may have put blogs on the map. But now individuals all over the planet are using new blogging tools to share gritty, uncensored information.

"If you see a car bomb blast, your first thought is not to go to an Internet cafe and start blogging," said digital media expert Erik Sundelof. ...

... Sundelof is the creator of "Lebanon-Israel Conflict Via Cell Phones," a blog that is different from the tens of thousands of web logs sharing facts, opinions, pictures and often unfettered anger about events in the Middle East and elsewhere.

"What this is really creating is a way for normal people to tell their perspective," said Sundelof, who is working in the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University in California. ...

... Unlike the mainstream media, also known and often maligned among bloggers as MSM, blogs do not always have the same reliability as established news organizations.

"Journalism is about firsthand information. The Associated Press is credible, CNN is credible. If they're not, they will ultimately go out of business," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, a training institute for journalists in St. Petersburg, Florida.

But with blogs and some other new forms of media, "there's no foolproof method, and I'm not sure we will ever find a way of proving it is for real or not," said Finberg.
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